Media Streaming device

[sdifox]

anyone play with RASPlex?

 

[bearxor]

No, I haven't seen it yet. I might give it a whirl.

Still hate having to have a Plex server on the back end though. It might also be about time for me to try out RasBMC again.

Edit: After having watched the YouTube demo for RasPlex, I'll pass.

 

[smitbret]

I strongly considered the Boxee Box a couple of years ago when I got the WD Live Hub. I played with the Boxee interface on my PC and just couldn't see the benefit of getting the Boxee when the WD came with 1TB of internal storage for $20 more. Haven't regretted it at all. The WDTV is just about the perfect the device for what we need. My only complaint is the lag in the interface and that it won't display the meta data from the Media Server software because it insists on using DLNA. A quicker SoC and/or an optimized firmware with the inclusion of UPNP support instead of DLNA would make it just about perfect.

On that note, I got my Raspberry Pi today. I threw the OpenELEC version of XBMC on it and quite frankly I am very impressed. Response time with Mezzmo is almost instantaneous, which pretty much verifies the lag issues are with the WDTV Live and not with the server. Just a couple more things for me to iron out with it (universal remote and local streaming) and I could see a couple more of these making their way into the house. It played everything back very well. Supported full 1080p BR Rips and surprisingly had no problem with DTS or AC3 audio tracks. I couldn't figure out how to shut off the subtitles, though, but I think that may just have been because of the crappy remote control program that I was using.

 

[sdifox]

I strongly considered the Boxee Box a couple of years ago when I got the WD Live Hub. I played with the Boxee interface on my PC and just couldn't see the benefit of getting the Boxee when the WD came with 1TB of internal storage for $20 more. Haven't regretted it at all. The WDTV is just about the perfect the device for what we need. My only complaint is the lag in the interface and that it won't display the meta data from the Media Server software because it insists on using DLNA. A quicker SoC and/or an optimized firmware with the inclusion of UPNP support instead of DLNA would make it just about perfect.

On that note, I got my Raspberry Pi today. I threw the OpenELEC version of XBMC on it and quite frankly I am very impressed. Response time with Mezzmo is almost instantaneous, which pretty much verifies the lag issues are with the WDTV Live and not with the server. Just a couple more things for me to iron out with it (universal remote and local streaming) and I could see a couple more of these making their way into the house. It played everything back very well. Supported full 1080p BR Rips and surprisingly had no problem with DTS or AC3 audio tracks. I couldn't figure out how to shut off the subtitles, though, but I think that may just have been because of the crappy remote control program that I was using.

Do you have a plex setup to test the RaspPI against?

 

[HydroSqueegee]

I have a Windows home server running Plex and use a roku2XS and a roku3 to stream. I absolutely love this setup. I came from a windows media center setup and the roku+plex route is far simpler and has been a much better implementation than the WMC box.

The roku2XS interface skips and lags a tiny bit with the latest update, but the roku3 is smooth as silk. Its stupid simple. My 6 and 8 year old use it all the time. Cant say how it handles blue ray rips since indont have any, but i do have a decent library of DVD rips, and everything works perfectly over G wireless. Netflix and Youtube on the roku is fantastic also. The remote looks a little silly, but its RF. So you can tuck the roku away into a hidden spot and change the channel from the other end of the house. Which is nice.

 

[smitbret]

Do you have a plex setup to test the RaspPI against?

I don't, but Mezzmo is the same concept; media library management and automatically transcoding incompatible formats. I just load it up as a UPnP server in XBMC and it streams quite well. I haven't had to do any transcoding, yet, because the Pi running OpenELEC had no trouble playing back .h264 with .aac, .ac3 or .dts audio. So, I just ran it with the transcoder turned off. Just for fun, I set the device profile for Pi in Mezzmo to Amazon Kindle Fire because they don't have a Pi profile, yet. That makes sure that everything is transcoded to .h264/.aac which the Pi quite clearly supports. Played back Gladiator just fine.

I will pick up the VC-1 and MPEG-2 licenses in the next couple of days. Once I do that, I think I'll just run it with the transcoder turned off permanently. I may run into a music video or something in .flv that won't play, but I can't remember the last time I tried to play something like that. I may need to get a hold of the Mezzmo developers and have them build a profile that leaves VC-1, .h264, and MPEG-2 alone and just transcodes everything else.

 

[sdifox]

I don't, but Mezzmo is the same concept; media library management and automatically transcoding incompatible formats. I just load it up as a UPnP server in XBMC and it streams quite well. I haven't had to do any transcoding, yet, because the Pi running OpenELEC had no trouble playing back .h264 with .aac, .ac3 or .dts audio. So, I just ran it with the transcoder turned off. Just for fun, I set the device profile for Pi in Mezzmo to Amazon Kindle Fire because they don't have a Pi profile, yet. That makes sure that everything is transcoded to .h264/.aac which the Pi quite clearly supports. Played back Gladiator just fine.

I will pick up the VC-1 and MPEG-2 licenses in the next couple of days. Once I do that, I think I'll just run it with the transcoder turned off permanently. I may run into a music video or something in .flv that won't play, but I can't remember the last time I tried to play something like that. I may need to get a hold of the Mezzmo developers and have them build a profile that leaves VC-1, .h264, and MPEG-2 alone and just transcodes everything else.

I may start playing with all this.

Looking to pick up a used 48 port POE gigabit lvl3 swich :biggrin:

will play with home automation too.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I understand Boxee is a fork of XBMC, but the two are incomparable when it comes to usability and flexibility. XBMC has a lot more flexibility when it comes to add-ins and settings. Boxee takes a very "this is how it is" kind of setup that I GREATLY prefer. I've tried replacing my Boxee Box with a i5 XBMC machine and a RPi. It's simply not as intuitive or easy to use as Boxee got the the software to be before they were bought out.

That's why I still recommend the Boxee Box even though I know it's a "dead" product. Open the box, plug it in, specify your TV resolution, point it to network shares, start watching. Everything else is handled for you automatically.

Ah, ok I see. You really like that Boxee scraper that can take all those weird filenames media files come with and makes something of them. I forgot about that feature.

I HATED the Boxee scraper because my library was already cleaned up for XBMC and Plex. If you have a clean library the XBMC scraper actually does better because it is consistent and does the same thing every time.

That is a huge holdup of a XBMC setup though I will admit. When I first got going with it in 2010 I spent HOURS renaming the collection I had up until that point. XBMC wants clean file names or the media scapers goes crazy. I will still say though that with a clean library NOTHING beats XBMC for usability and flexibility.

Unfortunately though not only did Boxee go away, but no one else has really taken it upon themselves to try and go down that path of a more intelligent media scraper. So not only is Boxee dead, the idea behind Boxee's big innovation is dead.

I think a big part of the reason is because pirates (who drive development) have really moved to automated downloading software in the last few years. You don't need a good scraper because Sickbeard, Couchpotato, etc. automatically renames stuff and creates XBMC-compatible metadata files for you when the files download. If you are still manually torrenting stuff or ripping disks by hand then you are going to have to deal with extra steps that Boxee was trying to skip.

I had a friend of mine who ran into this same problem recently. He had a pretty big library, but most of it was from the early days of torrent so the file names were too l33t for XBMC to figure out anything. The only solution for him (as he was NOT going to spend hours renaming files) was to let sickbeard collect metadata for the files it could recognize, and then he just deleted and re-acquired the part of his library that it couldn't recognize. On the re-acquisition, sickbeard and couchpotato renamed everything for him.

This is just one of those situations where the solution is either 20% of the way (browsing folder in WD Live with no metadata) or 100% of the way (XBMC scraping a folder full of metadata made for it). That 50% solution Boxee put forth simply does not exist anymore. If that is the level of commitment I wanted for my setup I would be like you hoarding Boxee boxes....

 

[bearxor]

That's not really the reason why. Everything I have is properly named. It's really just stupid stuff.

Let's take my last XBMC trial.

Installed it, pointed to directories, let it build the database, tried it out for a few days, no problems. Went to watch a movie. A Good Day to Die Hard. This was my first movie.

Subtitles. On everything. Ok, well, turn the subtitles off. I did that, eventually figuring out where it was. Oh wait, there's Russian speaking parts in this movie! I need subtitles. Ok, stop the movie (sorry, baby, I'm working on it!), have to go in to the settings and fiddle around. Eventually figure out a way for it to only show the subs during the Russian speaking parts. Start watching the movie again, everything looking fine. Russian speech, subtitle, oh my god why is the subtitle staying? Yes, the subtitle stayed on the screen until the next part that needed to be subtitled. At least that was bearable.

So, after watching, for shits & giggles, fired up Boxee Box, played the file and with NO INTERACTION FROM ME WHATSOEVER, it only showed subtitles during the Russian speaking parts and they came and went the way they're supposed to. And, yes, AGDtDH was the last thing I watched on that XBMC setup.

So that's why I keep coming back to Boxee Box, over and over again, no matter what else I try.

EDIT: How about this ridiculous XBMC quirk. Point it to your file shares, let it scrape to build you show library. Then, go to TV shows. Every single folder, regardless of if it actually has shows in it, shows up in the list. This requires you to scroll past shows that might have nothing to watch in order to get to things you might actually have. This is just ludicrous behavior. Fixable? Sure, by opening an XML file and editing it. What? That is cray-cray. That should be default behavior. If there are no episodes in a folder, then you don't need to list the show in the TV category.

 

[poofyhairguy]

That's not really the reason why. Everything I have is properly named. It's really just stupid stuff.

Let's take my last XBMC trial.

Installed it, pointed to directories, let it build the database, tried it out for a few days, no problems. Went to watch a movie. A Good Day to Die Hard. This was my first movie.

Subtitles. On everything. Ok, well, turn the subtitles off. I did that, eventually figuring out where it was. Oh wait, there's Russian speaking parts in this movie! I need subtitles. Ok, stop the movie (sorry, baby, I'm working on it!), have to go in to the settings and fiddle around. Eventually figure out a way for it to only show the subs during the Russian speaking parts. Start watching the movie again, everything looking fine. Russian speech, subtitle, oh my god why is the subtitle staying? Yes, the subtitle stayed on the screen until the next part that needed to be subtitled. At least that was bearable.

So, after watching, for shits & giggles, fired up Boxee Box, played the file and with NO INTERACTION FROM ME WHATSOEVER, it only showed subtitles during the Russian speaking parts and they came and went the way they're supposed to. And, yes, AGDtDH was the last thing I watched on that XBMC setup.

So that's why I keep coming back to Boxee Box, over and over again, no matter what else I try.

That is a good point. That is certainly one of those XBMC functions that gets handled with plugins but should be in the core probably.

Here is the plugin I use:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=153783

EDIT: How about this ridiculous XBMC quirk. Point it to your file shares, let it scrape to build you show library. Then, go to TV shows. Every single folder, regardless of if it actually has shows in it, shows up in the list. This requires you to scroll past shows that might have nothing to watch in order to get to things you might actually have. This is just ludicrous behavior. Fixable? Sure, by opening an XML file and editing it. What? That is cray-cray. That should be default behavior. If there are no episodes in a folder, then you don't need to list the show in the TV category.

I guess this one doesn't bug me as much because I have been editing advancedsettings.xml for years. It is the only way to have stuff like synced libraries, so I have been pasting lines into that file from the beginning.

As for the general concept, I COMPLETELY understand you. XBMC is the Linux of media systems- I have spent hours tweaking plugins, skins, etc. So I get where you are coming from.

I guess at this point I have kinda taken for granted how much work I have done tweaking my XBMC installs. For me it was much harder tweaking MySQL to be able to handle such a large library so that is the pain I remember, but little stuff like that certainly can add up if you don't want to mess with it.

I am glad Boxee created a product that works well for you!

 

[bearxor]

It's basically the reason I ditched Windows Media Center and CableCard and went to DirecTV. Pretty much the same reason I switched to an iPhone. I'm just tired of tinkering with shit!